The Australian television industry is run by powerful men who make money out of using the talents of women, the leading film critic Margaret Pomeranz told a women’s television forum on Tuesday.
“Maybe men like power in a way that women don’t – I don’t know what the answer is,” Pomeranz said. “I know that the women I see in television, often with families to consider, have such demands placed on them it is no wonder we are happy to leave the power positions to the blokes.”
In a room packed with 700 women who work in television, including the ABC managing director, Michelle Guthrie, the veteran TV presenter lamented that there were so few women in powerful positions.
Pomeranz said there had only been a handful of female heads of television at the networks – including Penny Chapman and Sandra Levy, both at the ABC – but that Levy had been “hounded out” out by the press.
“The shining light at the moment is Michelle Guthrie at the ABC,” Pomeranz said. “I hope [she] has a better time of it.”
The annual Astra Women in TV breakfast run by the pay TV industry body also heard from the actor Marta Dusseldorp and the TV chef Maggie Beer about their experiences in the industry.
All three women agreed that being famous made them a target for criticism. Beer and Dusseldorp both said they were often told by members of the public that they looked “much better than on television”, and Pomeranz said she can’t leave the house without makeup.
“There are women in the industry, I’m not arguing with that, but the main power belongs to men,” Pomeranz said. “I am a feminist because I don’t think the world is such a good place as run by men; I think a few more women in there would be a good thing.”
The former presenter – with David Stratton – of the ABC’s At the Movies, Pomeranz is now at Foxtel Screen. She said women were sorely under-represented in decision making roles.
“It is a big money industry, or it can be, and I believe that men in power believe the only way money can be generated is by men using the talent of a lot of women,” she said.
The chief executive of the Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association, Andrew Maiden, said women in subscription television had advanced at faster rates than those employed elsewhere.
Women are 32% of board directors, 26% of chief executives and 34% of executives across the industry, according to data released by Astra – but Pomeranz said it still wasn’t good enough. “Let’s face it, fellow women: we fall short in the power game,” she said.
Dusseldorp, who stars in Janet King on the ABC and A Place to Call Home on Foxtel, said she used to audition for parts in which women were always the victim. “If you could cry, and you were happy to run through the forest in your underpants with a man chasing you with a gun, you might get the role,” she said.
But times had changed and her characters are now complex and multilayered – including King, who is a lesbian, has a child and had a lover.
“I’m leaving my [own daughters] with, I think, a really rich, complex storytelling world that will only get more and more complicated, more and more diverse,” she said. “Diversity is on the lips of every production company I speak to – theatre, television, film. That is all changing. Colourblind casting is very important now.”
The breakfast is the biggest women-in-media event of the calendar and was attended by the New South Wales treasurer, Gladys Berejiklian; the chief executive of Screen NSW, Courtney Gibson; the Guardian columnist and Foxtel presenter Kristina Keneally; the TV executive Deanne Weir; the actor and director Matilda Brown; the Women in Media NSW convenor, Tracey Spicer; and the ABC presenter and national patron of Women in Media, Caroline Jones.
